10 ways to move through transformation + uncertainty
Steadying yourself through liminal change
Welcome! This is the Sunday Soother, a weekly newsletter about compassionate personal growth and authentic living, written by me, Catherine Andrews, a life coach, teacher, and writer. Did somebody forward this to you? You can subscribe to the Sunday Soother here.
Hi my Soothers. Before we jump into this essay, I want all of my Jewish, Israeli and Palestinian readers to know I am holding you so close in my heart. The violence has been heart-wrenching to watch, especially the families, mothers, children. I shared a couple of things in my Soother Slack and wanted to say them here too:
1. It has been close to impossible to watch the violence unfolding especially against children and know that so much of this is the outcome of overt militarization, patriarchal forces, toxic masculinity gone to a terrifyingly dangerous extreme, dehumanization and domination of others as a norm across the globe — the systems I know so many of us are absolutely sick of and desperately want to dismantle but that still have such a deep hold. I hope you are able to give yourself and your loved ones a big hug this week and take care. If you have organizations or charities helping on the ground you want to highlight, please do share in the comments or message me privately and I can share them too.
2. The day the latest war started from Garrett Bucks of The White Pages newsletter helped name some of the what comes from (like myself) being a protected person of privilege watching oppressive systems unleash violence on others.
3. This comment from the Cup of Jo community, a reader named Ruth: My rabbi just sent a note to our congregation with the following bits of wisdom, and I’d like to share those here. What to do in response to such horror?
1) do good in the world, in any small way, including reaching out to friends and family, researching organizations to donate to, or establishing a recurring donation to an organization in your community, like a food bank or free clinic.
2) sign up for a CPR/civilian response class to either learn or refresh your skills in responding to medical emergencies. You never know when you might be in a position to help someone else.
Her thoughts are grounded in a Jewish teaching: you don’t have to complete the work of repairing the world, but you also aren’t permitting to stop working towards that goal, even when your actions feel small.
Now, on to the normal essay.
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Happy Sunday, Soothers. I have the blessing - slash - curse of seeming, to outsiders, like I am relatively composed, poised, polished and have, if not all, at least some or most, of my life together and in control.
But if you actually could see my emotional insides, 99% of the time they look exactly like this:
I find this is a common experience of a lot of highly sensitive people. "Oh, you always seem so calm and together!" folks around us will exclaim.
What they don't know is that that placid exterior is often just a function of rigid panic and hypervigilance, barely holding the turbulent, roiling emotional highs and lows together inside. One wrong step, and it's like a volcano erupting.
I particularly right now feel in one of these more roiling and turbulent times. The fact is, this year has been hard in a lot of ways (though always enormously blessed and privileged too), mostly around my work. My work, which is at the core of so much of what I am (for better or for worse) and therefore my identity has been in utter transition and I am in a void.
The truth is, I don't really know what I should be, or am meant to be, doing for work anymore. And as somebody who is deeply driven by her purpose and what she does, this has been, uh, disconcerting to say the least.
(I'll put an aside here noting that many of us are actively doing the work to de-identify our worth and value from our jobs, and I think I've made decent strides on this front. My worth doesn't feel tied to what I do, how much money I make, or the success I have. But on the other hand, my purpose, and my identity, still feels strongly tied to what I do in this world, and that's okay with me. My work in many cases is...me. It's totally chill, right?)
On one hand, I've been in business coming up on four years now, and feel as if I've just wrapped my hands around this whole running a creative online biz/coaching thing. And sure enough, just as I feel some steadiness in that area, a whole new calling comes at the edges of my consciousness.
I've always been quite open about my spirituality and happy to talk about it and include it in my writings and offerings. Yes, I am a Tarot reader, Reiki practitioner, feng shui student, animist, and energy worker. This work is effective, powerful, I and my students and clients have benefited deeply from it, and I've always thought I haven't held any shame or fear around proclaiming that openly.
But I've never fully allowed myself to center my spirituality and energy work in my offerings. They've always been more of an aside, a complementary lesson to something more traditional (leadership, business, dating, self-discovery, Western-evidenced-based practices like nervous system regulation or other more standard life coaching and therapeutic approaches for growth and healing).
And now I feel much more deeply that my spiritual, energetic, animistic and plant-medicine-based work is meant to be the center and core of what I offer, and...
I hate it.
(lol)
I'm scared, honestly. I know enough that most people in Western culture don't take this work seriously, and often mock it outright. I'm fearful of how people would judge me and dismiss me. I come from a very traditional academic/corporate background — valedictorian, degrees from prestigious universities, decades in a corporate environment, from a family of government employees. I'm scared of losing beloved clients or readers/audience members who aren't interested in the topics I want to delve into more (which is totally understandable and fine, I certainly have never believed in shoving my belief system on anybody else). I'm afraid people will think I've been brainwashed and am loony for my feng shui rituals, my energetic practices, my nature-based rituals, my belief that your home and everything in it and around it is alive and thrumming with consciousness, that animals show up as powerful signs and totems just as you need them...
And I'm afraid of centering it in my work. Of starting over, when it feels like I just got my legs steady in this business. Of creating new packages, new offers, and beginning again.
So, yeah. Me and my work? We're going through an identity crisis.
And the world around me is reflecting it. A baby black snake showed up on our staircase last week. In the cellar one day I was sent into a panic attack by seeing a feral cat who had somehow snuck in through a tiny hole in the foundation (the charm of living in a 300-year-old house is real, and so are the critters who share it. And yes, we patched the hole — but after the cat showed itself out). I feel foggy personally most days, waking up. I stare at my keyboard, cursor blinking, unsure what to offer, to write, how to market and sell my work.
To counteract it, I sometimes send myself into frantic, frenzied spirals of nothing-work (busybody productivity that makes me feel like I'm making progress but is the energetic equivalent of doggy paddling furiously in one place).
I'm having strange and vivid dreams, of ice floes collapsing, one dream of us having sold the nature witch cottage only to move back into a traditional suburban townhouse and immediately realizing it was a horrible decision to have done that (huh, that one is starting to make more sense.)
I'm pulling the Hanged Man over and over in Tarot, the card that says, "You're just going to have to hang out in the discomfort of not knowing a bit longer, sorry, buddy."
So yeah. WELCOME TO THE VOID! The liminal. The change. The uncertain. The uplevel.
It's so fun!!!
Maybe you're in it, too. The day before you're reading this, we'll have had a solar eclipse, our first one since April, though you may have been feeling the energy of it the weeks before now. Eclipses are often considered energetic portals that bring about major shifts in our lives. They can be associated with endings and beginnings, turning points, times when fate takes the wheel, and periods of intense self-exploration and profound metamorphosis (check).
Since I'm in this period of identity-shifting, and the eclipse is bringing it forth too, I thought I might give you a few offerings on how to hold yourself through this liminal change stage, where everything might feel goopy and wobbly and uncertain and gross.
The first thing I can offer is that these times of liminal change and identity shifts are less about us needing to DO something, and more about cultivating safety, and steadying ourselves. The change is happening, we don't really need to do anything to accelerate it, and, if we can help it, we shouldn't try to suppress it, dismiss it, wish it away or make it try to disappear, either. A priority should be creating a safe container for which the change can occur. Think about a caterpillar who is goopily changing into a butterfly. Its cocoon is its retreat, its place of safety for this change to occur. Sure enough, the change will happen without the caterpillar needing to DO anything for the unfolding to take place. But it needs a place of rest, retreat, and safety. What can that be for you?
I love during these times of change and uncertainty to ask for help out loud. I don't know to whom I'm asking. Sometimes it's my ancestors. Sometimes, my spirit guides. Sometimes it's trees. Sometimes I think it's my future self. Sometimes it's just a plaintive cry to nobody and everybody. But I make the ask along these lines, "Please bring me clarity, please give me the next right step, please help me steady myself, please help me handle this with grace..." or whatever arises. The key is it's asked out loud. And I often do get help in return. It's rarely ever what I think it "should" look like, but it often comes. Sometimes it's just a unique bird that flies in front of me. Today I was walking along a trail, asking for help out loud, and a few minutes I ran into my friend and her joyful dog who is obsessed with me and so happy to see me, and we had a nice walk home together, and I think that was the help. Try it out.
EFT tapping has held me through many a transition. It is Western-evidenced-based for helping your nervous system get out of fight or flight and helping you get back to a state of regulation and calm, while processing the emotions that may be dysregulating your nervous system. Some EFT YouTube faves for times like these, all from Brad Yates: You'll be okay; fear and panic right now; feeling nervous; clearing a sense of dread.
Simply connecting with nature is my favorite and cherished way of holding myself through change, because nature embodies it so perfectly. Shedding. Changing. Cycles. Death. Rebirth. Compost. Seedlings. Being in nature regularly reminds me that this is all normal. Identities change, leaves shed, things die and are reborn or absorbed into the floor of the forest. I too, am part of this.
In relation to that, let the plants hold you. Cherished herbs, flower essences, earth medicine and more are a part of my support system at this time. Oat straw, lemon balm for anxiety; hawthorn for heart-opening; a flower essence for grief and change; and probably I have the microdosing of psilocybin to thank for this change and identity cycle in the first place.
Use the tenets of feng shui and some conscious decluttering to support you. What I've learned through feng shui is that your physical surroundings and your home are an energetic and subconscious extension of your own identity. So if we can't do much while our internal goop is shifting and changing, we can intentionally work with the space around us. This could be a closet decluttering, a tidying of your bedroom, or anything else. You can also look at the bagua map, used in the school of feng shui that I study, which, when overlaid your home from the front door in, contains 9 areas of life and where they exist in your space, from health to relationships to abundance. Which area for you feels most in transition? Could you freshen that area up, move a plant or a vase of flowers to it?
Breathe. 4-7-8 breath. Box breathing. Soft belly breathing. The physiological sigh. Alternate nostril breathing. There are so many different kinds of intentional, conscious breathing that can help you feel grounded and a bit more at ease, both when you do them in the moment of feeling anxiety or ungroundedness, or just done regularly as a preventative measure. Pick one and try it at the moment you wake up, once during the middle of the day, and once before bed, even just for 2-3 minutes, and see how it impacts you.
Body work. By body work, I mean moving your body. Dance. Stretching. Acupuncture. Running. Massage. Your body, after all, is the container that is processing the change. You want it to feel as nourished and grounded as possible. This is my favorite deep hip stretch video for when I'm processing and changing.
Allow the discomfort. Change feels bad, unsettling, anxiety-provoking. I get that. And it's not necessarily a bad thing. We live in such a comfort-obsessed society that when we experience challenging emotions the only way we've been trained to deal with them is to try to get rid of them or numb them as fast as possible. When you next feel a wave of anxiety or discomfort or grief, see if you can set a timer for 60 seconds and just FEEL it, before reaching for a phone, or a computer, or a food or drink or whatever else. After 60 seconds, it's all good — go to whatever you might regularly use to numb or distract the feeling. The next time, try 90 seconds, then 120 seconds, and so on. You're expanding your capacity to be with difficult emotions.
Find safety in whatever way you can. Sarah from Moon Studio writes, "If there's one thing I want you to remember, it's this: eclipses aren’t anything to be feared. They are to be welcomed as potent invitations for change. When you change how you respond to the past, you create a different present. When done with consistency, and with knowledge of inner safety and trust, different tracks are laid down for a different future. Consciousness shifting, subconscious reprogramming, neural plasticity methods, and nervous system rewiring are the best activities to do during the eclipse season. Safety is key. The subconscious has to feel secure in order to believe in different riskier outcomes. We have to feel looked after, cared for, and encouraged in order to stretch, grow, and expand into new habits, actions, and versions of ourselves." What does that look like for you? Find your version of even just 5% of safety, just 10 minutes of maybe lying on the ground and breathing, and find the snatches and snippets of safety you can personally cultivate throughout the day.
To bookend this newsletter, I'm trying out something new: a video of me doing a Tarot reading for you around how to navigate change. I hope you like it! If you want to do this spread yourself, it's from Lindsay Mack and outlined here.
And if this all resonates with you, if you find yourself in a path of transition and change, consider reading about Soothe, my circle and coaching program for highly sensitive women needing support. You can book a discovery call with me here to learn more and see if it feels like a fit. We begin January 2024.
I’m also hosting an open house for Soothe this Tuesday, October 17 at 7pmET (replay provided). Wondering, is Soothe for me? Come join an open sharing and conversation about Soothe, the year-long circle and group coaching program for highly sensitive women. No need to participate or be on camera. I will share some Tarot, reflections, and then go over Soothe, show you the behind-the-scenes, and also share my work with herbs, flower essences, and microdosing and how that will be woven into Soothe. Recording provided. Registration required here.
Reads & Recs
Where I share articles, books, recipes, podcasts, beauty products and more that I'm enjoying! (A few links may be affiliate links off of which I'll make a small commission; I only endorse stuff I've tried and loved).
No real reads & recs today because I did a whole October roundup of recs and good stuff here in the paid version of the Soother.
But I invite you to leave in the comments, anything you're enjoying, and also, how do you steward yourself through transition, uncertainty and change? I'd love to hear, and I'll round up any comments into a future Soother newsletter.
That's it for this week, sending all my love for the week ahead.
xo
Catherine
PS: Don't forget to check out my Intentional New Year's Eve Retreat, and read more about Soothe circle here and book a discovery call.
And you can register for my “Is Soothe for me?” open house here!
Thank you so much for this! This year has been one of liminal change for me and reading your thoughts on it has clarified some things for me.
I just finished Tom Lake by Ann Patchett and it felt like the perfect comforting book for me to relax into each night, just a few pages at a time. Such a great & relaxing read for me especially as I am in the midst of a potentially massive shift...reading what I call “relaxing fiction” is really helpful for me during these times especially at the end of the day before bed, when my mind is tempted to start racing, instead it gets lost in these stories.
Your posts always seem to come at the exact right times! Will be going back to this one many times as a reminder over this next year. 💚